


screaming at the sky

by feuertatze



Series: here's what happens when you die [2]
Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Alex Has Anxiety (Julie and The Phantoms), Alex-centric, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bad Parents, Catholic Guilt, Character Study, Coming Out, Found Family, Friendship, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Parent Death, Internalized Homophobia, Multi, Pre-Canon, Recovery, References to Depression, alex is catholic, julie cameo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:35:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27565378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feuertatze/pseuds/feuertatze
Summary: "It's the certainty that gets you. The permanency. The bone-deep sensation of knowing.You know when you look at Luke smiling. You know when Bobby embraces you with easy touch. You know when Reggie leans in close to your throat.But sometimes. Sometimes you sit in Sunday mass, and you look up at the ceiling and try to remember how good it feels. Your parents spit thinly veiled hate at you while you’re free-falling, feet on the wooden flooring.Your house is always cold. You think you remember it being warm, once. Before.There is a scream stuck in your throat. Sometimes, you feel like you’re drowning from holding it in. "Alex thinks about love and breathing.(can be read independently)
Relationships: Alex/Bobby | Trevor Wilson/Luke Patterson/Reggie
Series: here's what happens when you die [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2004823
Comments: 9
Kudos: 42





	screaming at the sky

**Author's Note:**

> mind the tags! the homophobia is pretty tough in this one.
> 
> reading the previous fic is not necessary at all, but it adds additional explanation from reggie's perspective.
> 
> title from "my tears ricochet" by taylor swift

None of you know what it's like to die. 

Sometimes, you wish you knew. 

In the moments after dark, the priest's sermon still ringing in your ears. The moments when there are headlines again, when you're acutely aware of the blood pulsing through your veins.

You wish for it, but only a little. You assure yourself. Only a little. 

It's the certainty that gets you. The permanency. The bone-deep sensation of knowing. 

You know when you look at Luke smiling. You know when Bobby embraces you with easy touch. You know when Reggie leans in close to your throat, your breaths coming faster and your heartbeat staying a steady rhythm. 

But sometimes. Sometimes you sit in Sunday mass, and you look up at the ceiling and try to remember how good it feels. Your parents spit thinly veiled hate at you while you’re free-falling, feet on the wooden flooring. 

Your house is always cold. You think you remember it being warm, once. Before.

You tell yourself lies to cope. To get through the nights when all is too much, the days when nothing is enough. You cling onto the truths, your truths, simultaneously. They keep you afloat.

Here is a truth: 

Your heart beats too fast sometimes. It’s not a medical issue, it’s simply a part of you. You checked it with your doctor. 

Here is what you tell yourself: Your being is not an illness. It’s part of you.

Here is a lie:

Your parents love you like before they knew. 

  
  


You’re tipping from euphoria to dread quicker than you can follow these days. One day, you’re sitting on the hard church benches. Your entire being feels heavy, so you’re staring at the stone floor, your mother’s elbow roughly urging you to behave. You focus on the palm branches’ ashes floating on the stone ground while their burnt scent fills the choir vault in swirls of smoke.

The next day, you’re laughing loudly at your best friends’ antics during practice, feeling light. 

Anxiety catches up whenever you step on the front porch of that white beach house. It’s filled with cold disappointment, quiet rejection, silent pleas. Dread settles deep into your stomach, only easing when you see the light. A light burns on the windowsill of your neighbouring house, the one that’s never quiet and always angry. Reggie’s shadow is practising his guitar - even when you know he is already asleep. The night light reminds you of perspective.

There is a scream stuck in your throat. Sometimes, you feel like you’re drowning from holding it in. 

Here’s a second truth. Sundays are your least favourite days of the week. They hurt. They burn. They itch and worm their way under your skin with their twisted scripture and poisoned worship. They bury themselves in you, slowly, steadily, undoing all the acceptance you found between the last Sunday and this one.

Here's a second lie - the last one for tonight, you tell yourself. You don't believe it. Not really. 

Here it is: You are okay. You are fine. 

Thoughts tend to echo in you. It's part of the reason you're always on the edge of freaking out. _Didn't you listen_ , they say, _didn't you listen when they said where your kind are heading towards._ You pull your covers over your head. You hit your drums faster than you need to. _There is no salvation for the corrupted_ , the words echo, biting. You try to breathe around them while their poisoned blood is still burning in your throat from Holy Thursday. 

The dark feels oppressive, silence crushing. 

You stare at the ceiling in your childhood room. There is someone praying somewhere in the house. There is always someone praying in the house. It’s never you. You close your eyes. 

You wish for death, terrified. You cling onto life, desperately. You tighten your hold on your small family with demons in your head, guilt in your stomach, lies on your tongue. 

_I know_ , you say. _I’m trying, Mom and Dad_ , you whisper. _Twisted,_ they spit, refusing your peace offerings, their touch freezing, your lips slowly turning blue. 

Your parents look at you like they don’t know who you are. You’re biting back tears, always. There is old scar tissue on the cracks in your composure, your parent’s unloving sneers scratching on it until you hurt again. Thin blood streams from the sharp-edged hate run down your cheeks like tear tracks.

When your parents finally explode, the flames that have been simmering, surge up in a jet of searing hate. You scream back while your heart cracks into two clean halves. _You can fix this_ , you tell yourself, desperately trying to keep your life from falling apart. It’s a lie. _Lie, lie, lie_ , everything in you screams over your mother’s loud venom. Doors slamming in your face, you trying not to break down while you grab your things, and with that, it ends. 

Reggie holds you tight, while you’re caught in an endless, terrifying free-fall and finally break down. Tears keep blurring your sight, rejection and bitterness stinging deep, deep down. You feel exposed, vulnerable, laid bare, so you try to disappear, and hide in your sweater and Reggie’s arms. 

You stop going to church. You haven’t confessed in weeks. 

You crash and burn and you choke from the ash that keeps falling, burying you in the wreckage of your life. 

The ash sticks to your skin like wet sand on the beach. 

Your throat feels too tight to breathe, gasping for air through guilt. It sits deep beneath your skin, ingrained in your thoughts and life and soul. You lash out, angry words and loud drumming, - you break down, sobbing and holding onto somebody’s shoulders for dear life - and repeat.

Here’s a truth: You’re not alone. You find out from the way Luke shares his second blanket with you without you asking and holds you for weeks. From the way Bobby leaves the last piece of pizza and lets you stay with Luke in his garage without ever mentioning it. From the way Reggie makes more stupid jokes on your quieter days and casually holds tight onto your hand whenever you reach out subconsciously.

There is certainty, there is sureness between your band. It’s the one thing that keeps you afloat sometimes. You’re secure in your love, never doubting each other and for more than a moment at a time. You work together, complete each other, _kill_ the music thing as a group - their acceptance was never a real question. You’re family, you realise, once again. Sometimes family is chosen, Luke’s songs declare. Reggie adds a little riff for emphasis and approval, and Bobby shoots a blinding grin. 

You find worship in the way Luke’s throat curves, the muscle in his neck stretches. You touch his shoulders, follow the way of his collarbones, feel the curves of his arms, let your gaze linger on his face while he sleeps.

There is liturgy and prayer in the lines of his stomach, in the softness of his hair, in his quick, violent exhales when you tug on strands of his hair a little too hard, in you gasping when his calloused fingertips ghost over your skin, feather-light. 

You find prayer in hearing the rhythmic drumming of Reggie’s heartbeat when you lay your head on the dip between his collarbones, in his infectious laugh when your hair tickles him where you’re tucked under his chin. You tangle your hands with his, his lean fingers so suited to playing bass and piano intertwined with yours. There is softness in his expressions, but his eyes are dim sometimes and his music is angry and sad. 

Your emotions choke you, guilt piercing, drawing blood from your wrists and feet like on the crucifix on the wall behind the altar at church. 

So you burn. You hurt. It feels like there is a funeral pyre made of lies and hate and silence being built for you while you’re trapped in a cave. You desperately scratch at the walls and scream pleas for forgiveness. But you’re only met with the hard, unrelenting stone of you liking boys and your parents’ manic obsession with ancient texts. Attempts to reach you from your friends are a flicker of hope for absolution, for freedom - only for them to be futile again and again. 

So you sing. Sing to cope, to light up your mental darkness, to deal with your overwhelming feelings, to feel joy that isn’t dependent on someone else for once. You play music, rhythms, wonderfully logical beats, and you almost cry the first time you feel the old spark of joy inside of you again. Without a laugh, or a smile, or a touch from your friends, you spark just because you did something you love. 

Bobby notices. He tosses you your drum sticks after that, every time you start to get quiet, start to pace up and down the garage. He’s bad with words and bad at expressing his feelings, but he gets you just like the other two do. 

  
It takes time. All things take time. You know this. You’re good with time, with rhythm, patterns. You have to be. For your music and for your sanity. Slowly, your demons fade. They go from screams that drown out everything else to whispering quietly. Still, you’re always acutely aware of the scratches and torn-off patches of scars that have yet to heal. The night isn’t gone yet, but sometimes it feels like you can see the first light of dawn.

  
  


There is a certain quiet in the absence of your parents’ hate. It’s a certain contentedness that comes with knowing there won’t be pointed silence and forced prayer when you walk into the garage like back at home. The loud shouts next door that could sometimes be heard through a window accidentally left open have been replaced with mindless acoustic guitar strumming, the biting accusations with light-hearted teasing.

There is no one praying here except you and for the first time in a long time, you do so without fear. There is music and laughter instead of your thudding heartbeat in your ears now. 

Here’s a truth: You’re not okay yet. When you whisper it late at night, almost ashamed, Luke answers in a conspiratorial whisper, _Me neither_. You stop breathing for a moment there. Then you reach out and hold onto your best friend on the air mattress which is a thousand times nicer in its uncomfortableness than the hard wooden benches at church.

The wish to know what death is like comes less these days. You’re not sure about what comes after anyway, now. When you hear faint church bells on Sundays, you avert your eyes and say nothing for a long while.

Sometimes, you stand up and pace up and down and up and down and try to not think about how the priest always used to say _remember to confess your sins this week_ or _let us celebrate our bond with Him_ or _we have to defend our beliefs from those who try to destroy God_. You pace and fall down again even though when you look down your feet are firmly on the ground. You feel eyes and raised eyebrows looking at you and want to curl in on yourself, your skin prickling with guilt, anxiety, and remnants of a cold so wrong for this sunny City of Angels. 

Here’s a different truth: Your wounds never stop bleeding, your scars never really seem to heal. You’re anxious and jumpy and never seem to measure up to what Luke can do, what Bobby can do, what Reggie can do. They're there anyway. They offer band-aids and painkillers and antiseptic. You don’t want to take them. You know why your blood is dangerous. But you’ve fallen again and scabbed your knees open and Luke kneels down, reaches a hand to help you get up again. 

The first time you wake up in the middle of the night to crying, you consider the possibility you’ve only dreamed all of this. After all, there is always someone praying in your house. It’s never you. Only the crying at night, that’s yours. It registers then that you’re not the only one who buries their emotions until you’re alone in the darkness. 

It turns out your touch helps.

You don’t mention it.

You can’t believe how you ever missed this. When was the last time you’ve not been woken to soft crying, heavy, shuddering breaths, a hand searching for your face in the dark now? 

Things don’t stay easy. They never were, if you’re really honest. Someone keeps turning off the heating in the garage and even though it’s not cold outside, it is in there.

Turns out, breathing is still hard when your lungs are sticky with guilt and issues and anxiety. Breathing is hard when both your hands are being held but you still can’t think of anything else than the dark nothing that’s your future and the smoking ruins of your past. Your family will never speak to you again, your friends have their own issues to deal with, and your fall never, never, never, never stops. Your heartbeat is like thunder in your ears, your eyes are burning, your feet are moving without your permission, never stopping. You should be at church, you should be praying, you should never look at a boy ever again - your confessions don’t end. You whisper them into the dark room at night, endless lists of regrets and sins and how _good_ it all feels, despite all of it. 

Days are better than nights. With break having started for Reggie and Bobby, you can focus on music and improving as a band. Luke writes songs, and they are triumphant, about beach days and small gigs, even though he keeps looking over to the rest of you, contemplating. Reggie, whose face mirrors the state of his parents’ marriage when he thinks he’s not being watched, laughs louder on Spring days and starts carrying his guitar with him pretty much everywhere. You love how much he doesn’t care about what people think. He makes you a little bolder and on one memorable Saturday afternoon, you even take Bobby’s hand in public. You’re a little shy and slightly blushing, but his smile and the warmth in your chest are worth it. 

Sometimes, the smell of sunscreen is so strong it overpowers the memory of incense. 

Here’s a truth: There is nothing like the realisation that falling is terrifying but hitting the ground is what’s going to hurt you after all. 

You startle awake or pause so suddenly you miss your beat or your hand comes to a sudden stop on soft skin, whenever you become aware of this yet another time. You’re terrified, paralysed, afraid of what might happen once your carefully constructed cathedral of fragile happiness and gentle touches crumbles. But when you look down, expecting flames or at least a sharp rock you’re about to fall down onto, you only see your fuzzy socks. Then, you usually feel a warm hand sneaking into yours, hear someone turning up the volume of their guitar a little too fast on purpose, are met with a forehead softly leaning against yours, a reassuring whisper of _You’ll be okay, it’s okay, we’re here_. 

The crash comes suddenly all the same. 

Your head starts spinning and doesn’t stop. 

The voice in your head that was almost quiet is now screaming again. You want to scream back, but you lack the air for it.

Disconnected thoughts are bouncing off the corners of your mind again with seemingly no intention of ever, ever stopping. 

Your skin feels too tight, every room both too small and too big, slightly spinning around you. It feels like you’re just a single, tiny point in endless, eternal space and no one will ever care and nothing you do will ever matter because it’s all empty anyway and you’re so so _alone_.

You end up with warm bodies pressed tight against yourself, crammed onto the couch you didn’t realise you were sat down on. They talk to you, nonsensical sounds that only turn into something resembling words after a frightening amount of time. You give a wry smile. There is a cold void inside you. You think you smell incense, but this time it makes you gag. Your day is spent gasping for air, staring into nothingness, your friends’ arms never leaving your shoulders and worried glances exchanged over your head.

That day, you realise you stopped believing in God a while ago. 

There is no one who can judge you anymore - no one who knows what you think, no one who makes the rules, no one whose pure existence is agony. No ghosts of forfeited salvation, of lost promises of Eden can reach you with their dead hands and nightmarish wailing anymore.

Maybe there is a god. You’re okay with that.

It won’t be the god your parents wanted you so badly to love. It wouldn’t be your god anyway. 

  
It’s freeing, the realisation. A stone you felt might kill you under its weight has lifted and your morning dawns. 

When you look up, the sun is starting to rise behind the glass windows of the garage. Luke’s head is laying on your shoulder, heavy eyelids, weeks of lost sleep clearly visible. Reggie is leaning against your knees, tapping away at a rhythm on imaginary piano keys. And Bobby is scribbling in his notebook, his side pressed against yours, more shadows under and in his eyes than you remember. 

It hits you how much you’ve missed. 

Your friends all smile when they see you touch ground again. You sneak onto the roof and watch the sunrise, cuddling for warmth in the morning chill. Someone plucks at the strings of an acoustic guitar.

The blood on your hands is coming off in flakes. Underneath, there is fresh scar tissue. 

Here’s a truth: You’re getting better. You don’t have to bite back an acid taste whenever you see a church anymore. You don’t have to hide your happiness and excitement from your guilt anymore when you feel hands on your skin. 

There are always chords floating through the room now. You play gigs in the evenings and do street performances in the afternoons, applause fuelling all four of you now dreaming about becoming professional, getting as big as you know you have the potential to be. 

Hopefulness is an odd feeling for you. Unfamiliar. A little scary, if you think about it for too long. But it’s exciting enough in its fleetingness that you forget the graveyards of unprocessed issues and trauma each of you carries for a while. 

Luke still cries sometimes when he thinks you are asleep. Bobby still refuses to come near cars. Reggie writes country songs he thinks nobody notices are about missing home and coming back to a house. And you still stare at the stars at night and half want to burst into tears at the emptiness of it all, half wonder where your place is in all of it. 

But you get better. When you talk about making that _Orpheum_ gig work, Luke even mentions maybe inviting his parents, and Bobby visits his parents’ graves with his grandmother for the first time. Reggie, well, Reggie stops going home every day and instead just stays with Luke and you, watching movies until 2 am. You think that’s a good sign.

  
  


There is no formal break-up. It happens gradually and you startle when you think twice about taking Luke’s hand in public, one day. You’re okay with it. 

You clung to each other when the world seemed to crumble around you and as you built it back up. 

You’re ready to let loose and look at the world around without fear and terror now. 

Your certainty, your secureness in your connections extends to the knowledge that you’re all in it for the long game. 

You’re a band, best friends, family, still. Maybe even when you’re not going to be a band anymore, one day - all good rock bands have a fall-out after 10 years on tour -, then you’ll still be family to each other. 

But you can exist now without having that last bit of touch, that certain pull in your chests, heartbeats thrumming in your ears. 

You’ve healed enough that you can find romantic love somewhere else now - without giving up on all the other forms of love you find between yourselves. 

  
When the world was burning and you were left to die by it, you were there for each other and that will stay forever. Your love is just as meaningful and just as monumental now as it was when you still woke each other up with kisses.

  
  


Your last evening is triumphant. Loud. It’s ecstatic and intoxicating. You’ve all worked for this for months, it’s encompassing of all your ups and downs, of your grief and of you finding acceptance. You realise how deep your love for your best friends is in the first moment on that stage - but there will never be the realisation you would’ve had during the opening notes of your actual set. You won’t ever know what revelation would’ve revealed itself to you when the crowd would’ve started cheering. 

Because you die before the evening even starts. That day’s sunrise, the one you missed sleeping, buried in pillows and warm arms, will be the last you’ll ever live through. 

You wish you didn’t know how dying tastes. 

It’s a muddy taste of mouldy bread and the memory of poisoned wine. 

There is something tragically ironic in all of this. 

Dying tastes of pain, sharp ice-cold hate, old scars breaking open and bleeding again, just when you thought they had healed. You didn’t realise blood hurt this much until now, it was always the wound itself. 

It tastes metallic, the tickles deeply unpleasant. 

Dying feels like you’re burning on the inside at first. Your body coughs more than your lungs can handle and then you feel yourself desperately gasping for air and coming up short for the first time in months.

In sudden clarity, there is the awareness of how much you all needed each other, how much you’ll always need each other, how much it will hurt when one of you will get lost, inevitably, somewhere down the road. 

There is no scripture in your mind, now. No priest, no parent talking about hate under the guise of holiness. For once, your blood isn’t the tainted thing but what the world around you gave you. 

There is nothing now. 

  
  


You always knew you would stay with your family - the part that wants to stay with you - forever. You just didn’t know that forever would be so soon. 

You cry to feel less lost in all of this darkness - knowing it would’ve been worse, a thousand times worse if you had been alone. 

You think you scream. You don’t hold it in anymore, because you’re already dead.

  
  
  


Here’s a truth: There will always be another sunrise. 

Here’s another truth: There will always be another resurrection. 

And a last truth: You’ll never be truly alone because you love and you are loved. 

You’re loved so strongly that it reaches even beyond death. 

And somewhere, 25 years in the future, a girl with a cheeky smile and a voice made for music is loved so much that love reaches back into life and sweeps you along.

  
  


You watch the sun rise behind Julie. There are clear notes and love filling the space that used to be so clouded with sadness and desperation. You’re not alone and you’re home and you’re _loved_. 

This is a second chance - one your parents’ hateful god would never have given you. 

You can breathe now.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> character study fics for luke and bobby will be there at some point, but nanowrimo and exam season makes finding time pretty hard. 
> 
> thanks for reading! feel free to yell at me about these sad boys in the comments!
> 
> as usual, thanks to awip for the screaming and encouragement!


End file.
